oh what, this old thing?

The Undeath Carrier! *glee!*

Dropped from Heigan The Unclean, a fight in which I was the only one to die. Pretty early on too. A kindly druid had to battle-rez me and I ruined everyone’s chance at The Safety Dance. *shame!*

So, you know, as beautiful a staff as it is, ’twill forever be tinged with tragedy. I’ll get over it. Tomorrow is another day!

Oh, and Torn Web Wrapping too, once again I find myself way over the hit cap.

these go up to eleven!

Still no sign of the Truesilver Shafted Arrow, not part of the meta-achievement but I would like it anyway. By contrast, having now had three Lovely Black Dresses, the luck suggested in that achievement is vastly overestimated.

Anj spent eighty Emblems on Heroes’ Cryptstalker Tunic, her first ever piece of Tier armour pushing her unbuffed mana up to 11111. That’s pretty snazzy. Only 38 Emblems needed now for the gloves…

A hit rating of 7.99% required a minor gem-replacement adventure though. How cruel to tease a poor Love Fool with 0.01%! That’s even without points in Focused Aim and Sphere of Red Dragon’s Blood equipped, mind you. Throw them in as well and she would be in very real danger of aggroing a boss from the next expansion.

(extra: gaze ye upon the segment of guild chat and wonder what on earth the conversation was about. also: the damage meters. BM ftw!).

see, this is what the chess event needed…

They (the “They”) say that the British love a good queue. They will walk across burning coals to get to one, regardless of what is offered at the end of it, just for the chance to stand in line for something, all civilised.

Now, I’m technically British. I’m not sure how much weight that carries for it was, after all, the sheer chance of birth location and I have no love for the concept of patriotism, but being as how I hang around with a lot of other British people I don’t think I’ve met anyone who has said “A queue?! Where! Get me to the queue!”. Queues are annoying, but I think it is true that your British people will join them begrudgingly and silently seethe to themselves whereas your Americans will just flip out and splash Uzis around semi-colon, close bracket.

But look! Look!

Naxx25, after the Four Horsemen encounter and instead of everybody jostling to the front and clicking like mad on the chest (as happened countless times in Karazhan), almost without any instruction whatsoever everybody formed an orderly line. There’s me and Bups at the back there on the top picture, dancing and talking amongst ourselves as we filed gently to the front. So civilised! As queues go, it was a joy to be in it.

So, yeah, Naxx25. In with a group that could officially label me as “Being Carried”, I found out a few things:

1. I am saving up for a new compuper but I am sure that this one cannot do twenty-five player raids. My framerate was below ten for most of the fights. For all I said about The Macro a few posts back, it was only the fact that I was spamming one button that got me from 16th (a few fights in) to 13th (at the end) on the damage meters. Sorry, The Macro, you have your place.
2. Turning Spell Detail right down to the minimum is all well and good, but I honestly think that I’d be doing okay for FPS if there was another option to turn everybody else’s spell casting effects off! It wouldn’t be ideal but, hey, my poor elderly compuper. :(
3. All video effects down to a minimum and 1024×768 :O By comparison it had the look of a cute 8-bit game bringing back lovely memories of my happy Amstrad CPC6128 days, which was okay I suppose. Maybe next time I’ll try 800×600 and keep living on pasta so maybe I can get a new machine next month.
4. We didn’t do the Plague Quarter so I didn’t see if Arrowsong dropped, although I did get some new boots. However, having decided I needed to replace my boots to drop some haste, I managed to collect a replacement pair with even more haste. I have too much haste! WHY IS IT SO HARD TO AVOID HASTE?! My Steady Shot cast time is just over a second! :p More apologies and defense for The Macro, at least spamming that keeps my rotation in check without going mad.
5. Finally, Naxx25 is really easy! When…  you’re in with a group that downs a boss under two minutes. :\

Welcome to the “I’ve Slapped Kel’Thuzad, Big Style” Club. Thanks, ooh a card too? Marvellous! :D

jus’ moseyin’ along…

Patch 3.1 looms with its crazy changes, extra bag space and Beast Mastery given a full and frank apology abounds. Exciting future-visions aside, here in the hinterlands there’s not much going on except for the usual heroine antics with the possibility of “Hey, look what gear I got!” posts.

Okay, well, Wraith Spear if you must know, enchanted up to the nines with Massacre (850g spent on a single enchant, a new personal best), to replace the Icier Barbed Spear from Amphitheatre of Anguish back at level seventy-faaahve. I’ve also moved into a guild that has Naxx25 on farm and they’re going to run me and my friends through it quite soon, to which all I can say is: OMG! Arrowsong!

Talent-wise, I shifted a point out of Mortal Shots to put back in Beast Mastery because, although people say that you can still get as much DPS from sixteen pet talent points as you can from twenty, the increased survivability of kitty from the extra points should not be underestimated. Still no exotic pet, I mean if I was around in the area and Loque’nahak showed up, I’d make an effort to tame him but I certainly ain’t going out of my way.

Besides, I’m glad I did, an extra tier of pet talents sounds pretty nice. I am, of course, assuming that this extra tier will only available to members of the BM51 Club… ;)

And that’s it really. Not much else going on. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important to us.

(photograph by architekt2 and shared under a Creative Commons license)

a cautionary tale: watch your hit rating.

Happily popping arrows into Archavon the Stone Watcher, he got to 20% health with just five seconds of cooldown left to go on both Sphere of Red Dragon’s Blood and Bestial Wrath. Mmm, I’m going to save the Kill Shot a few seconds.

Popped them both, giggled maniacally and teased my finger over the button for Kill Shot…

Press!

MISS!

Oh. Em. Gee! That was the one shot that missed! A bitter lesson learned the Hard Way once again. Hit rating, anything less than the cap just isn’t worth risking.

some time later…

I played with this idea today, touching on subjects as to why a random number generator would miss the one shot that was going to be so effed up and linking it to why, when peeling an orange, if a squirt of tart citrus juice is going to squirt out it is more or less guaranteed to hit you RIGHT IN THE EYE and where this places the notion of fate, predeterminism and the idea of a non-existent god. I came to conclusion that it was all just mindlessly keeping my mind busy to shield me from a dull day at work and that it doesn’t mean anything. The fact that a random number generator will sell your whole family into slavery at a moment’s notice and an orange being malevolent enough to want to blind you is only because these outcomes are infinitely more memorable than the millions of other times they do pretty much what you want or expect them to them to do. Plus it wasn’t the only shot that missed, there was one other but it was an auto shot which probably wouldn’t have crit so that put a stop to that. Yay Teh Godless Universe!

notepad vs. dreamweaver.

I’m not so easily confused that throwing one extra shot into my rotation is likely to trip me up, but a slight shift-around of the action bar in order to make my four mainly-used abilities a little closer together is causing some problems, nothing that won’t take a little getting used to though.

The cooldown of Arcane Shot allows for three Steady Shots, and two rounds of Arcane, Steady, Steady, Steady fits nicely into the duration of a glyphed Serpent Sting. OMG WTF LULZ this is too much, I need a macro!

Winters has macros, and she loves them. There’s one for a Mangle followed by two Lacerates, another for Mangle with two swipes and a third one for an onmouseover Lacerate, they work very well. The thing is, while tanking there’s target switching, looking out for escaped mobs and generally ensuring that all the monsters are primarily concerned with her, plenty to be keeping an eye on. Even though most of the time it’s spamming one of three buttons, there’s still a sense of involvement.

For ranged DPS though, the next logical step to a shot-rotation macro is to bind it to every key on the numeric keypad and I can just repeatedly mash it with my palm, proud of the fact that I’m providing flawless DPS (for the most part, not counting a number of variables that can and will make any such macro fall flat on its face) but slightly troubled by the fact that I might as well not even be there!

Pretty soon all hunters will be wearing the same outfit, using the same weapons with the same pet and the same talent spec and that is when you know the end is nigh.

There will be no rotation macros for me because I can manage pressing buttons and still find time to give a knowing wink to the healer when an escaped mob trips a timely-placed Freezing Trap and disaster is averted. “Macros”, psh! BRK should be ashamed of himself, delete his character immediately and roll a warlock.

I’ll reserve the domain http://www.bigbluedemon.com right now…

:P

rip it up and start again.

It’s been a long time since Tori, my blood-elfin defection to the Horde side, was taken out for a run in the world, stuck at level 39 and still too far away from exalted with the Darkspear Trolls to expect any kind of cool raptor mount anytime before level 45. Also, thoughts of paying money to transfer her to a server that shares a battlegroup with my Alliance home of Talnivarr were another problem. Something had to be done, no matter how drastic.

Maybe it’s time to start anew and, to be honest, if you’re going the Horde route and want to do another Hunter, a blood elf is a silly choice. With +1% critical strike rating with bows and the Berserker racial ability, it’s pretty clear that your ideal Horde hunter race is troll. Also, the coolest Horde mount is assured from day one.

So welcome Joot! But, look, compare and contrast Joot with the needlessly-full-of-himself-faded-rock-star-turned-reality-TV-voidbox Pete Burns as seen on the cover of his Greatest Hits album:

Greatest Hits album, yes. There’s… now, let’s see… You Spin Me Round (Like A Record). And it’s an album. But never mind that. Go Joot!

Initial impressions of the Chromaggus realm: Having no fancy level 70 alts around to provide pocket money for spending sprees, we’re back to the double gathering of the mining and the skinning. Happily, so far two stacks of copper bars have been quickly flogged for just shy of 10g, and that’s just over a half-price undercut! Certainly enough money for a 6g Netherweave Bag with plenty of change. On Dunemaul the market was flooded with raw mining materials, I’d struggle to fetch 2g on full stacks. Liking it already. Yay!